The death of Peter Fonda
seems like one more reminder that the Sixties are now long gone. I vividly
recall going out to dinner, circa 1970, with my husband-to-be in a trendy
bistro on the Sunset Strip. To us the back room, overlooking the lights of the
city below, was the height of elegance. So it was a curious moment when some
well-dressed young women started excitedly unrolling a huge poster. It was an
almost-life-sized image of Fonda and Dennis Hopper, astride their choppers,
decked out in their Easy Rider duds. That wasn’t a poster I’d want to
display in my own home, but it seemed a fair encapsulation of what was in a lot
of youthful minds as the Sixties faded away.
Peter Fonda, son of the
iconic Henry, began his film career in the romantic comedy, Tammy and the Doctor (1963). But before Easy Rider (1969) made the tall, lanky
Fonda a spokesman for the Counterculture, he had already become a Sixties icon
as the chopper-riding Heavenly Blues in The
Wild Angels (1966), Roger Corman’s gritty celebration of the Hells Angels
motorcycle gang. (Sample dialogue: “We want to be free to ride our machines
without being hassled by the Man! And we want to get loaded!”) Fonda was then an enthusiastic supporter of
the drug scene. He helped the fundamentally strait-laced Corman shed his
inhibitions by shoving a kilo of marijuana into Roger’s mailbox as a Christmas
gift. And when Corman followed up the notoriety of The Wild Angels with
an hallucinogenic LSD film (1967), The Trip, Fonda demanded that Roger
do research by dropping acid himself. (Roger’s one and only LSD trip, which
took place in California’s Big Sur, has become the basis for The Man with
Kaleidoscope Eyes, a screenplay that Corman alumnus Joe Dante is still
hoping to shoot.)
Peter Fonda described the
genesis of Easy Rider in a 1969 issue
of Take One magazine. Staying at a Canadian hotel for a
motion-picture exhibitors’ convention, he happened to study a publicity shot of
himself and Bruce Dern riding their choppers in The Wild Angels. Staring at the iconographic photo, Fonda got an
idea: “Man, yeah, that’s the image . . .
a dude who rides a silver bike and turns everybody on and rides right
off again.” As the movie’s plot evolved in his head, he decided, “Let’s get to
Mardi Gras in the film, great time, we’ll have a lot of free costumes and shit
like that, a real Roger Corman number where we don’t have to pay.” Easy Rider was produced by Fonda in 1969. He
and Dennis Hopper (a longtime friend who had been featured in The Trip) wrote the screenplay, along
with novelist Terry Southern; the roles played by Fonda, Hopper, and Jack
Nicholson were to make them all stars. Corman, aware of the developing project,
tried to help get it AIP backing.
Sam Arkoff, the creative head
of American International Pictures, has admitted that AIP was ready to invest
$340,000 in Easy Rider, but balked at
Hopper’s plan to direct the film himself. Arkoff and company believed that
Roger Corman, with his low-budget track record, would be the best man for the
job. Hopper, of course, proved them wrong. But while Corman had no part in the
finished film, it very much reflects his spirit and style.
It was Fonda and Hopper,
though, who got the kudos. They shared a screenplay Oscar for Easy Rider,
and Fonda also collected an acting nod for his sensitive 1997 role in Ulee’s
Gold. He’ll be missed.
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